Arellano shot while celebrating birthday

Law enforcement authorities in Baja California Sur on Tuesday continued their search for suspects in the shooting shooting death of Francisco Rafael Arellano Félix, the oldest of five brothers who led the once-powerful Arellano Felix drug cartel.

Arellano was killed Friday during a celebration at an upscale resort along a tourism corridor between San José del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas, said an official with the Baja California Sur Attorney General’s Office. But it was not a children’s party as has been widely reported, he said.

“It was his own party,” the official said in a telephone interview from La Paz, the state capital. The official requested that his name be withheld, a common practice for Mexican law enforcement agencies, where only highest-ranking officials are often publicly identified.

In an interview Tuesday with the Mexico City newspaper, El Universal, another agency official, Mario Alonso Zazueta Obeso, said there had been 35 to 40 witnesses to the incident and several said that the gathering had been a birthday party for Arellano. Zazueta told El Universal that Arellano's wife and two of his sons were in attendance.

Arellano would have turned 64 on Thursday.

Arellano’s killer wore a clown costume and carried an automatic pistol, said the official interviewed by UT-San Diego. Arellano had been living in Los Cabos for the past five years “like any other citizen,” the official said.

The killer targeted Arellano directly, and “did not endanger any other guest,” the official said. As of Tuesday afternoon, no arrests had been reported.

Arellano was the oldest of five brothers who built the once-powerful Arellano Felix drug cartel, which saw its heyday in the 1990s in Tijuana, but has been progressively weakened with the deaths and arrests of the brothers. The organization is now led by a nephew, Fernando Sánchez Arellano, according to law enforcement agencies.

Arellano had spent time behind bars in both the United States and Mexico on drug charges. He was deported to Mexico in 2006 after seven years in a U.S. penitentiary.